Do you eat with your toddler?

[BabiesNeedInstructions]

I eat breakfast with ds 19mo every morning, and we have lunch together on the days he's not at nursery. But he has dinner at 5:30 and only eats certain things, so I never have dinner with him. I want to wait until he's in bed and cook a proper grown-up dinner with DH when he's home from work, rather than have fish fingers or whatever in what I consider to be mid-afternoon! Usually while ds eats I sit with him and chat and have a cuppa, or unload the dishwasher or something in the same room.

Do any of you out there actually eat that early? Should I feel bad or stop being such a pfb mum?!

We eat the majority of our meals with DD 16 months. She mostly eats what we do, but if it is new to her or she has rejected it in the past then I will do something like a piece of fish for her and give that along side small portions of what we are having. We eat at 5.30/6pm with her. Is much better now that she can manage a spoon and fork by herself.

She stole my falafel this evening!

One thing I have noticed is, that our 1 yr old eats much better, and enjoys eating more when she is sitting with others to eat.

I always eat with my 3 dc in the week & the whole family eat together at weekends.

I know for a fact the older dcs (5 & 8) hate eating alone (if for example we end up with a staggered breakfast due to different waking times).

We always eat our main meal together and always have - since DS3 was about a year old we've all eaten dinner around 5.30 when DH gets in from work - DS3 went to bed at 6.30 until very recently so we had a narrow window to fit in eating as family meals are very important to us - my kids are 18, 14 and 5 and we all eat together almost every night.